To much this and that about this and that

There has been a lot of this and that going on about this and that this fall. Here is a bit more about this and that per my observances of this and, I suppose, that.

Our office manager, on Monday morning, was talking about the latest mass shooting at a small church in Texas Sunday. “They say he had a mental condition,” she said, following up with “something has got be done about these people with mental conditions getting guns.”

Boy did she hit that nail on the head!

I read that the youngest victim of Sunday’s shooting was only 17 months old, and one of eight members of the same family killed. My heart aches for them, and all the others, but especially that family.

A 17-month-old child is a joy to behold. I think back to holiday time when my now 25-year-old was about 17 months old and all the fun and exciting times we had. I can not begin to imagine the agony these people are feeling and are going to feel as we head full force into Thanksgiving and Christmas. I can not even imagine.

Once again we’re back to that same old story. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. I’ll reiterate my standpoint on that one. Crazy people with guns most certainly kill people.

On the subject of my 25-year-old, I remember the days of the empty nest. Funny how fast a person can get over that.

My dad had surgery on his spine at St. Dominic’s in Jackson last week. In an effort to be closer to the hospital we left the country and moved back to our old house in the city — where my daughter lives, works and plays — for a few days .

Our little girl keeps a nice clean house — on the inside — but Lord have mercy has the pine straw taken over the yard. It took me just about hour Wednesday night to rake the driveway. Yes, I said “rake” the driveway. Glad that’s her nest now and not mine.

“Oh well, I don’t have to look at it very long,” I told myself, in my obsessive compulsive manner, since surgery was scheduled for 6:00 a.m. Thursday.

As is common with these kinds of things, 6:00 a.m. turned to noon, turned to 2:00, turned to 5:00 when the surgery finally began. The surgery went very well, but the night was very long, and very loud, and very bright and all the other things that nights in a hospital are.

It seemed like the nurse popped in and popped on the lights every 15 minutes or so — I know it wasn’t quite that often, but it seemed that it was — to pop another pill down my dads throat as orders for various pills came through the system.

On and off, on and off, on and off, and then it was daylight once again.

Proof positive, as I’ve always heard, a person can not get any rest in a hospital!

As it happened with those time slots for the surgery, the time slots for release from hospital changed from Saturday, to Sunday, to Monday. Obviously patience was stretched, nerves were rattled and that darn clock on the wall ticked louder, and louder, and louder, as our 85-year-old patient watched the hands go around, and around, and around.

Then to add insult to injury time changed on Sunday, the clock fell back and rest assured not a soul in our room felt like they got an extra hour of anything good much less rest in that dreaded place.

Don’t get me wrong, the surgeon was as kind and compassionate and talented as he could possibly be as were the members of his operating team. And the nurses, assistants, orderlies and everyone else I met in their color-coded uniforms did everything within their power to make Dad as comfortable as possible.

I don’t think I could do any of their jobs and keep a smile on my face with a new computer system — which by the way they just started using on Monday of last week. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I could do it even without that new computer system thrown into the mix.

It is just too much this and that about this and that. Then you get to throw in the ornery people!